The Trump administration is giving Iowa more say over how it spends federal money for education, opening the door for other states to do away with some of the rules that govern how they are allowed to spend taxpayer dollars.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon said Wednesday that Iowa will receive a waiver as a step toward “returning education to the states,” though schools have long been run largely on the local level.
In July, the Education Department invited states to “seek waivers from burdensome statutory and regulatory provisions.” Iowa was the first state to apply for and receive such a waiver.
“This approval cuts through federal red tape, eases compliance burdens for districts and empowers them to implement strategies that best meet the needs of their students,” McMahon, flanked by students and Iowa officials, said at a news conference Wednesday. “This is just the beginning.”
The federal government disburses billions each year for states to spend on education programs that fund myriad services, including those for low-income students and children with disabilities. Each federal program has its own set of rules that determine eligibility and how the dollars can be spent.
But for decades, Republicans have wanted to give states more discretion over how they spend their federal allotments. Critics, meanwhile, have raised concerns about how states would be held accountable for their spending.
The waiver will allow Iowa’s education department to combine more than $9 million from four programs — aimed at training teachers, supporting students learning English, and after-school programs — with fewer restrictions on how it must be spent. State leaders said they will use the redirected funds to improve math and literacy instruction and build out Iowa’s teacher pipeline, among other initiatives.
The waiver will also allow the head of Iowa’s education department to free school districts from some federal spending requirements — an exception that has been around since 1999.
Overall, officials said the changes will save Iowa $8 million in staff time that was dedicated to making sure the state complied with federal spending regulations, said Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R).
“The more red tape that we cut from the federal level, the more Iowa can increase education quality,” Reynolds said.
Crucially, however, the state can only lump together a small amount of federal program dollars while the bulk of grants will flow to districts as usual, said Anne Hyslop, director of policy development at All4Ed, an advocacy group.
“What was approved in Iowa is unprecedented,” she said. “However, this is far less ambitious in scope than what Iowa state leaders originally dreamed up. That original request would have fundamentally reshaped the federal funding landscape, and this approval does not do that.”
The state’s initial proposalsought to funnel more than $100 million a year into a block grant — a lump sum of funding that has fewer strings attached than payments that are program-specific.
“On the one hand, certainly having flexibility around the … dollars will be helpful,” said Dale Chu, a senior visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank. “I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing.”
Still, some critics worry this model could reduce the federal government’s ability to make sure the money is spent properly and reaches the most vulnerable students — especially following recent staff reductions in the Education Department and the decision to move several offices to other departments.
“Without certain guardrails of targeted funding, we are very concerned that some student populations may be overlooked,” said Joshua Brown, president of the Iowa State Education Association.
Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (Virginia), the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Education and Workforce, also said there are important standards agencies are supposed to meet to qualify for education money.
“Secretary McMahon’s decision to hamstring the Department of Education (ED) and unilaterally grant Iowa’s request to waive accountability guardrails attached to federal dollars demonstrates the Trump Administration’s willingness to ignore the law and abandon marginalized students,” Scott said in a statement.
Before the Education Department’s creation, Scott said states failed to educate many students with disabilities, address racial gaps in education and properly distribute money to lower-income areas. “That is precisely why maintaining a federal role in education is so important, and ‘returning education to the states’ fails to learn from the mistakes of our past,” Scott said.
The waiver could be risky for Iowa. When money is issued in block grants for low-income programs, funding gradually shrinks over time, according to a report this year by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank.
The report contends that’s partly because it is harder to measure and track the impact from broader pools of funding, compared to more specific grants. “The lack of compelling evidence of their effectiveness makes block grant programs vulnerable to reductions,” the report said.
However, Mark Lane, superintendent of Iowa’s 1,200-student Woodward-Granger Community School District, said he has a school board that makes sure taxpayer dollars are being used appropriately. He is looking forward to spending less time on data reporting and compliance, a “time-consuming” responsibility he shares with one other staff member.
“It does feel, sometimes, like a waste of time, the amount of times that you have to check boxes, have to type a three- or four-sentence answer into a text box and it feels like you’re repeating yourself over and over,” he said of federal compliance procedures. “I’d rather be working with my principals, I’d rather be working with my teachers, I’d rather be engaging my community.”
At least a dozen states have pushed the Trump administration to give them more freedom to spend federal education dollars. Indiana, Kansas and Oklahoma have all either submitted or plan to submit waiver requests, according to All4Ed.
Arkansas said Wednesday it plans to seek similar waivers in the coming weeks. “Anything that provides more flexibility for states to use federal funds to do good on behalf of students is a good thing,” said Arkansas Secretary of Education Jacob Oliva.
Still, the waivers announced Wednesday fall far short of proposals by Reynolds and some other Republicans to combine a larger pool of federal funds to local schools into block grants to be administered by the states. Some experts argue the Trump administration would have faced legal challenges had it approved Iowa’s broader request without congressional approval.
“That fairly clearly would contravene the statutory limits on waivers,” said David Super, Georgetown Law professor who has studied legislation involving the federal budget.
Iowa’s waiver represents a tiny fraction of its federal education funding. Last year, the federal government expected to provide nearly $1.8 billion in education funding to Iowa, mostly for federal student loans, according to Education Departmentdata. The agency also provided hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to support everything from preschools to literacy education.
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